The Archive of Forgotten Inventions

In 1836, the US Patent Office burned to the ground. What was lost that night was more than just paper.

The Models That Survived

Inventors were once required to submit a physical working model alongside their patent application. Thousands of these models survived the fire, forgotten in a warehouse that has never been fully catalogued.

Among them: a device with no known purpose, built in 1871, whose schematic suggests it was designed to transmit information across distances without a wire.